Weekly Review: The Week I Caught Avoidance Wearing a Productive Disguise

This was my first week of actively looking for a job, and my first weekly review. I didn’t set goals formally, but I had a clear list in my head: draft my resume, update LinkedIn, start an agent project for my portfolio, test my English, work out, and build a list of target roles. By Saturday the pattern was impossible to miss — the tasks I finished were the easy ones, and the two that mattered most never got started.

What I did finish, I finished well: a two-version resume, an updated LinkedIn, four logged workouts, and an IELTS test that handed me an honest baseline. But I caught myself over-investing in the resume — spinning up session after session to “refine” something already done — while the agent project and the JD list sat untouched. That contrast was the lesson. I wasn’t avoiding work by doing nothing; I was avoiding it by staying busy with easier things.

Underneath it was something simpler and harder: I was avoiding real decisions about my future, because deciding means giving up possibilities. As long as I don’t choose a project or a target company, every option stays alive and nothing can be judged. But a kept-open possibility produces nothing. The only thing that creates real options — actual interviews, an actual project — is a decision, even an imperfect one.

The week did give me evidence to work with. The gym habit stuck because of two things: low friction (it’s close to home) and an immediate reward (the feeling of exertion) — exactly what my job-hunt tasks lack. And working from a café produced real output, while working from home produced the couch. That’s no longer a guess; it’s data about how I actually operate.

So next week is built around acting, not optimizing. Go out every day. Start the agent studies — in Chinese translation first, to kill the “I should read it in English” inertia that stopped me cold. Build the project with LangGraph, in public, and the very first step is concrete enough that I can’t hide behind it: create the repo on GitHub on Monday. List at least twenty target roles. The point isn’t to keep every door open — it’s to walk through one.